New Every Morning:
I was reading Romans 13:1-5 the other day. This passage about submitting to governing authorities stirred up something I’ve carried for a long time. I’ve heard this text preached from pulpits. I’ve also seen it used to control people. So I brought my questions to Claude, and what came out of it surprised me enough that I wanted to share it here.
She Said:
I’ve heard sermons on Romans 13, and it can turn into abuse so easily. How does one know when the authority is wrong and you have to fight to change it? The first Americans fought England. The first Christians fled Rome. I’ve had pastors use this scripture to control. What’s the real context, and what do the Greek words actually mean?
Claude Said:
Paul wrote this to a young, nervous church in Rome, right after Jewish believers had been kicked out of the city under a previous emperor. He wasn’t handing them a political theory — he was continuing a thought from chapter 12, which ends with “don’t take revenge, overcome evil with good.”
The word for “submit” is hypotassō — it means to arrange yourself under something. It’s a word about a voluntary posture, not a command barked at you from the outside. Paul had a different word available for flat-out obedience, and he didn’t use it here.
And the authorities themselves are only described as good by what they do — verse 4 calls them “God’s servants,” there to reward good and restrain evil. That’s the purpose, not a blank check. When the Hebrew midwives disobeyed Pharaoh, when Daniel kept praying, when Peter told the Sanhedrin “we must obey God rather than man” — none of that was an armed revolt. It was quiet, costly non-compliance to authority that had stopped doing what authority is for.
One more thing worth saying plainly: Romans 13 is about Caesar and the state. It was never about a pastor’s authority over your personal life. When it gets used that way, it’s not being stretched — it’s being aimed at the wrong target entirely.
That word submit hit differently for me, because I lived it. For years, I tried to understand and submit to my husband. I suppose I took it further than I should have, because I didn’t know better.
She Said:
My husband used that verse — wives submit to your husbands. So when he’d walk out the door for work, instead of saying goodbye, he’d say “don’t go anywhere.” I had doctor’s appointments. We volunteered at a nursing home. I’d freak out trying to figure out if going would make my marriage worse. I know it was wrong for him to say that without even knowing my schedule — but it was also wrong for me to collapse into victim mode over something as small as a doctor’s visit. I was miserable over little things like that. And then it was submit to my pastor. And now it’s submit to the manager of my building. LOL.
Claude Said:
Look at the gap between the word and what it became. Hypotassō describes something you position yourself into — not something someone else commands into you. “Don’t go anywhere” was never a submission language. It was control, wearing submission’s clothes.
And I think it matters that you can separate your part from his. What he did — using a verse to override your doctor’s appointment — was done to you. The collapsing, the frantic self-checking over small things — that was the shape you grew into trying to survive it. Both are real. They’re just not equally yours to carry.
That the same posture followed you to your pastor, and now — with a laugh — to your building manager, tells you something important. Once a word gets bent that early and that thoroughly, it doesn’t stay in one relationship. It becomes the lens you see every authority through. Naming that, and laughing at the building manager part, means you’re not inside that pattern anymore. You’re looking back at it.
That got me thinking about something bigger than any one relationship: where is the line, really?
She Said:
It’s so hard to grasp the line. Where is that line? I think we each have to find it — and I know the way to really find it is to listen to the Holy Spirit. But that’s the hard part. We want a definite line, and with God there probably isn’t one. It’s a relationship with Him that gives us the line.
Claude Said:
That’s the whole tension. A line feels safe because you can measure yourself against it once and be done. A relationship asks you to stay present, moment by moment — which is so much harder.
But I don’t think God is being vague to make life difficult. I think He’s insisting on a real relationship instead of letting us settle for a substitute. A line can be followed by someone with no love in them at all. Paul put it this way: the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Not because rules are evil — but because a rule alone, without the Spirit animating it, is exactly what got used on you. Elijah looked for God in the wind, the earthquake, the fire — the dramatic, line-shaped things — and God wasn’t in any of them. He was in the whisper. That still seems to be where He tends to live.
So maybe the line isn’t anywhere. It’s just not fixed in advance. It’s found fresh, today, in listening.
“New every morning.” That’s where I landed. And I realized it’s harder than just accepting a rule. But only because our pride wants to do things our own way, and it’s hard for our logical minds to hold “I have a will and a choice” alongside “but do it God’s way.” I once had a heavy discussion with someone about this. I said, “So we don’t have to follow the Ten Commandments anymore?” She said yes. I said — what?! LOL.
Claude Said:
Paul asks that exact question, word for word, in Romans 6:15 — “Shall we sin because we’re not under law but under grace?” His answer is immediate and absolute: by no means. He saw that wrong turn coming and shut the door on it himself.
Here’s what unlocks it: “under the law” was never mainly about the content of the commandments — it was about the law as a system for earning righteousness. Galatians calls the law a household guide, walking us along until we are mature enough not to need the escort. That doesn’t mean everything it taught was false. Jesus said He didn’t come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it — then made the moral law deeper, not lighter. Not just don’t murder — don’t carry hatred. The heart was always the real target.
What changes isn’t the content. It’s the mechanism. God promised a day He’d write His law on hearts instead of tablets, and give a new spirit so people want to walk in His ways instead of being policed into it from outside. That’s not “no rule.” It’s “the rule is now who you’re becoming.”
And your will doesn’t get erased in that. It gets aligned — so that wanting His way and choosing it stop being two separate, exhausting battles.
It doesn’t get erased. It gets aligned.
Every day. Every morning. Reading, listening, praying — not to get the rule right once and be done, but to show up again tomorrow and listen again. That’s the whole practice, isn’t it. Not a formula I master and file away, but a relationship I return to, fresh, every single morning.
If you’ve ever tried to submit your way into misery — to a husband, a pastor, a rule, a role — I’d love to hear where you found the line between the letter and the Spirit in your own story.
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